Science

• If you are struck by lightning, your skin will be heated to 28,000 degrees Centigrade, hotter than the surface of the Sun.
• If you trace your family tree back 25 generations, you will have 33,554,432 direct ancestors.
• The average distance between the stars in the sky is 20 million miles.
• It would take a modern spaceship 70,000 years to get to the nearest star to earth.
• An asteroid wiped out every single dinosaur in the world, but not a single species of toad or salamander was affected. No one knows why, nor why the crocodiles and tortoises survived.
• If you dug a well to the centre of the Earth, and dropped a brick in it, it would take 45 minutes to get to the bottom – 4,000 miles down.
• Your body sheds 10 billion flakes of skin every day.
• Because of the rotation of earth you can throw a ball farther to the west than to the east.
• Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.
• The orbit of the Moon about the Earth would fit easily inside the Sun.
• Coca-Cola can be used as car oil.
• The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.
• Chicken liver can be used to change A type blood to O type blood.
• It takes only 8 minutes for sunlight to travel from the sun to the earth, which also means, if you see the sun go out, it actually went out 8 minutes ago.
• Of all the animals on earth the mosquito has contributed to the deaths of more people than any other animal.
• There are over one hundred billion galaxies with each galaxy having billions of stars.
• The surface area of the lungs is roughly the same size as a tennis court.
• The typical lead pencil can draw a line that is thirty-five miles long.
• Due to precipitation, for a few weeks, K2 is taller than Mt. Everest.
• The symbols + (addition) and – (subtraction) came into general use in 1489.
• If every person in China stood on a chair and jumped off at the same time…it would knock the earth off its axis!
• The coconut is the largest seed in the world.
• There is cyanide in apple pips.
• If you were to take 1 lb. of spiders web and stretch it out it would circle the whole way around the world!
• Scientists with high-speed cameras have discovered that rain drops are not tear shaped but rather look like hamburger buns.
• In space, astronauts cannot cry because there is no gravity.
• A donkey can sink into quicksand but a mule can’t.
• Every time you sneeze your heart stops a second.
• The Earth weighs 6,500 million million million tons.
• Honey is the only food consumed by humans that doesn’t go off.
  

  People

• Potato crisps were invented by a Mr. Crumm.
• Albert Einstein never wore any socks.
• If you trace your family tree back 25 generations, you will have 33,554,432 direct ancestors.
• The average human will eat 8 spiders while asleep in their lifetime.
• The average left-handed person lives 7 years LESS than a right-handed person.
• The average person has over 1,460 dreams a year!
• Each nostril of a human being registers smells in a different way. Smells that are made from the right nostril are more pleasant than the left. However, smells can be detected more accurately when made by the left nostril.
• Children grow faster in the springtime than any other season during the year.
• All babies are color-blind when they are born.
• Humans are born with 300 bones in their body, however when a person reaches adulthood they only have 206 bones. This occurs because many of them join together to make a single bone.
• May babies are on average 200 grams heavier than babies born in other months.
• Leonardo da Vinci was dyslexic, and he often wrote backwards.
• Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had only one testicle.
• Queen Lydia Liliuokalani was the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Islands. She was also the only Queen the United States ever had.
• Rolling Stones band member Bill Wyman married a 19 year-old model Mandy Smith in 1988. At the same time Wyman’s son was engaged to Mandy Smith’s mother. If his son had married Smith’s mother, Wyman would have been the step grandfather to his own wife.
• Children laugh about 400 times a day, while adults laugh on average only 15 times a day.
• It is not possible to tickle yourself. The cerebellum, a part of the brain, warns the rest of the brain that you are about to tickle yourself. Since your brain knows this, it ignores the resulting sensation.
• The best time for a person to buy shoes is in the afternoon. This is because the foot tends to swell a bit around this time.
• Astronauts get taller when they are in space.
• In the courts of the Roman Empire, instead of swearing an oath on a bible, men swore to the truth on their statements while holding their genitals. Hence the word ‘testify’, from ‘testicles’.
• If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, there would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Americas and 8 Africans. Only 1 would own a computer.
• Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
• Babies are born without knee-caps. They don’t appear until the child reaches 2-6 years of age.
• If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction
• Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.
• A left-handed person finds it easier to open a jar than a right-handed person because they can supply a stronger anticlockwise turning force than a right-handed person. However a right-handed person will find it easier to tighten the jar up afterwards.
• Winston Churchill was born in the ladies room at a dance.
  

  Business

• The first Internet domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985.
• When Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone back in 1876, only six phones were sold in the first month.
• Approximately 7.5% of all office documents get lost.
• Business.com is currently the most expensive domain name sold: for $7.5 million.
• In 2001, the five most valuable brand names in order were Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, and Nokia.
• In Canada, the most productive day of the working week is Tuesday.
• In a study by the University of Chicago in 1907, it was concluded that the easiest color to spot is yellow. This is why John Hertz, who is the founder of the Yellow Cab Company picked cabs to be yellow.
• It takes about 63,000 trees to make the newsprint for the average Sunday edition of The New York Times.
• On average a business document is copied 19 times.
• The largest employer in the world is the Indian railway system in India, employing over 1.6 million people.